Tribute to Peggy Endel

Delivered April 2, 2006 by Darden Asbury Pyron.

I am an historian but my field of scholarship is biography. I not only
write about individual lives but I teach a course in biography,
autobiography, and memoir and I am as interested in the theories, history,
and ideas of biography as in the scholarship of researching individual
lives. Of the various issues involved in biography, an epistemological
problem concerns me especially, summarized in the question: What is a
biographical fact? A written life uses two kinds of facts, public ones and
private/domestic ones, even as biography considers two kinds of folks, public
ones—the famous, like presidents and generals—on the one hand,
and private ones on the other—our neighbors, our parents, for
example—people who affect the ones around us and few others.

The facts of public record—elections won, battles lost, offices held,
triumphs celebrated—are matters of literally written note. Such data
would encompass the inauguration of our inductees into Phi Beta Kappa this
afternoon. Your membership has become a matter of permanent, official record.

But there is another category of biographical data, softer facts, we might
call them, information that lives less in the material world of achievement
and writing than in the human heart and memory. Thus if your initiation
into this organization today is one sort of fact, your family’s pride in
your achievement will most likely never be expressed in writing. It will
live instead only in their hearts and memories—and, of course, in your
own recollections of their pride. It is not less a fact for its
ineffability. This category of facts involves affections and manners, it
includes the way we carry ourselves, the way others perceive us. It is
about memory and recall, even nostalgia, as much as actual action or even
physical reality itself.

All these assumptions come into play as I consider the life of my old,
dear friend Peggy Endel. There are facts of record of her life: her birth
in Montgomery, Alabama—she was a true daughter of the South, a major
source of our affection for each other—there was her graduation from
Smith in 1964 where she, like you today, was tapped into Phi Beta Kappa;
her graduate work in English literature, her PhD; her 25-year teaching
career here at FIU; her presence at the creation of this chapter of Phi
Beta Kappa and her term as its president.

These are facts, but they do not differ very much from the lives of many
people on this very platform and in this room. Thus, you might well ask
after this short catalogue: “So what?” or “What of it?” or grosser still,
“Who cares?” My answer to such questions moves us away from physical facts
and accomplishments into that softer realm of impressions and affections.
And I begin with an assertion of affection: I loved Peggy and I delighted in
her company. I claim, however, that my affection and delight arises from
more than mere subjective pleasure. These softer facts not only illuminate
who she was, but further, suggest the larger meaning of her life.

Years ago, Peggy and her husband Barney Guttenberg attended a fancy dinner
party I threw for a very distinguished visiting professor from the
University of Florida. Bertram Wyatt-Brown sat next to Peggy. As the
party broke up, he shared his enthusiasm for Peggy as a dinner
companion. “How I wish I had such intellectual companionship in
Gainesville!” he told me. He was talking about her intelligence and grace
as much as conversational skills.

I also recall my last conversation with her, just outside the D.M. where
she was soaking up the sun on a perfect South Florida afternoon. Oh, yes!
We ranged over a huge variety of topics beginning with our children—she
liked my three almost as much, perhaps, as I did her two girls. There
were issues of in-laws, too, dogs, grandchildren, and international
geopolitics. We also discussed pedagogy, classroom performance, and
curriculum. At one point, she cocked her head, peered into the ether
(after her wont!) and said, in her highly imitatable Alabama accent,
“Darden, do you think someone should be able to graduate with a degree in
English without a required course in Shakespeare?” Her department was
debating this very matter at the moment, and she quoted one of her
colleagues declaiming against this motion with the explanation that it would
“privilege” Shakespeare—using that horrid neologism that
turns a noun into a transitive verb. Ouch. I began a diatribe that dropping
a Shakespeare requirement was tantamount to the collapse of Western
Civilization, not to mention the disintegration of academic values in our
university. I raged. Peggy remained calm and contemplative. For all her
passionate commitment to Shakespeare in particular and to the traditional
canon in general, she possessed a breadth and generosity of spirit that
allowed legitimacy even for a position she abhorred.

Then there was the conversation just before that one, when I went to her
for advice about Shakespearean comedy in a course I was teaching on
laughter and humor (yes, the Honors College actually offers such a
course). What of Shakespearean comedy, I asked, if I am doing Plautus?
“Yes,” she began (again in that lovely, lilting voice)
“Twelfth Night, certainly, and then Midsummer Night’s
Dream and wind up with Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeare in
Love.” How neat, I still think to myself, how she knows
instinctively how permeable are the lines between comedy and tragedy, the
ridiculous and the sublime, or even the sublimely ridiculous, and how
splendidly Shakespeare captured such subtleties: Pyramus and Thisbe;
Bottom and Flute; Romeo and Juliet; Dromio and Dromio; Sebastian
and Olivia. My syllabus, three years later, still follows the outline
Endel recommended.

She could be sharp and critical, too, if never mean. And sometimes we
disagreed—once at least. A decade ago we both attended one of the best
opera productions I have ever experienced, Richard Strauss’s Ariadne
auf Naxos. I loved it. She hated it. She was completely dead wrong.
Period. But she did come up with a delicious phrase which I still
love when she called the production, “Ariadne Obnoxious.”

There are other manifestations of the softer facts that defined her
life. At a party last year, I mentioned her death to a long-ago former
English major who had been her student. He hardly recalled her name, but
he remembered the style. “What a great teacher she was,” he
began, “She could read Shakespeare and still weep in class.”
Reflect on that: after teaching the same material for decade in, decade out,
still seeing it as fresh and moving. And being moved, she moved her students.

And softer still: my recollections of her mother’s fruitcake
shared every year with me as long as her mother lived, and then the recipe
shared—still in her grandmother’s scritchy hand—after that.
This Christmas, not even knowing of Peggy’s battle with cancer, I made
my fruitcakes from her “Granny’s” recipe and thought about
Endel, her clan, and the pleasures of tradition.

So what still? So what of the life of my friend? So what of the life of
an old-timey teacher, of the life of a member of this chapter?

She was, indeed, an old-fashioned sort of person and teacher. She took a
traditional approach to learning and knowledge—no less than to recipes
and fruitcake. Indeed, it crosses my mind she was even born out of time
and place—maybe she should have been teaching at a small college forty
years ago and not at a great urban university in a big, not very Southern
city. But she saw neither FIU nor our crazily multi-ethnic student body as
foreign or even alien. She shared what she knew as if our students were no
better nor worse than ones at Vanderbilt, Furman, or Smith. If very smart
and critical, she was—I repeat—never mean. She was also devoted,
sympathetic, gentle and appreciative of the complexity of life and of what
it means to be alive and conscious of the peculiarities of the human
condition. She was humane in the grandest sense of that term—as in
“the humanities” which also represents the sine qua non of
this organization. She was also my friend. Her company elevated me and those
she touched, but she was also the friend of arts and letters. I miss her.
The University misses her, and each of you could look no further than her
life for a model of honor, decency, grace and intelligence.

———

For all these reasons, then, it is particularly appropriate that this
chapter of Phi Beta Kappa has agreed to a prize in her name. If she might
have winced (same as she did at the term “to privilege”) at a
“mentoring” award (I am sure she would have preferred a plain
old teaching award), the ideal of the universal teacher, intellectual
companion, and trusting guide is not far at all from her ideal.